The soul and personality of painting

The soul and personality of painting names a central aesthetic problem in the novel: whether a picture can embody the distinctive loves, hates, limits, and experience of its maker. Dan Gregory’s blunt judgment that Rabo Karabekian’s painting has no soul becomes more than an insult when Rabo recognizes the force of the criticism in Gregory’s own work. Later, an instructor at the Art Students League offers a less absolute account: personality may be the shortfall a painter makes peace with on the canvas. Rabo’s pursuit of soul is therefore also a pursuit of what his art can reveal about him—and what it cannot.

Gregory’s Test of the Work

When Gregory examines one of Rabo’s paintings, he first calls it not bad, then turns that faint praise into a verdict of disappointment. Before Rabo can answer, Gregory places the picture on the glowing coals in a fireplace. Six months of painstaking work goes up the flue in a moment. Asked what is wrong with it, Gregory says it has no soul. The destruction makes the judgment irreversible: the painting is not merely criticized but removed from the world.

Rabo does not dismiss the verdict as the whim of a cruel mentor. He believes he understands what Gregory means, and thinks the complaint carries weight because Gregory’s own pictures are vibrant with the full spectrum of his loves, hates, and neutralities. Their datedness does not cancel their force. Rabo imagines that Gregory’s works, gathered in a private museum in Lubbock, Texas, would form something like a three-dimensional hologram of the man: a presence one could pass a hand through, yet still recognize as Gregory. In this account, a painter’s soul is not a hidden message that a picture explains. It is the accumulated character made perceptible through the work.

Personality as Limitation

A different formulation emerges from Rabo’s encounter with an elderly teacher at the Art Students League. Looking through Rabo’s portfolio, the teacher struggles to explain his reservations. Technically, he says, there is nothing Rabo cannot do. The difficulty is not a missing facility that could simply be repaired by learning another technique. A fine artist, he suggests, must make peace on the canvas with the things he cannot do; the resulting shortfall may be what draws viewers to serious painting. He tentatively calls that shortfall personality, or perhaps pain.

The teacher’s uncertainty matters. He does not present a polished rule or claim to have solved Rabo’s problem; he says he is unsure even as he tries to articulate it, then finds the thought interesting because he has never had to put it into words before. The idea of personality thus remains exploratory rather than doctrinal. It also differs from Gregory’s severe diagnosis. Gregory speaks as if soul were either present or absent, while the teacher describes artistic character as a negotiated limit, visible in the space between what a painter can technically do and what the canvas ultimately becomes.

Rabo’s Pursuit of Soul

Rabo later describes the large fields of color in his studio as beginnings. He can stand before them for hours, intoxicated, but does not regard them as a completed answer. He expects the paintings to grow more complicated as he slowly closes in on what has eluded him for so long: soul. The repetition of the word conveys both ambition and uncertainty. Color gives him a place to work, but the presence he wants from the work remains something to approach rather than something he can certify.

That pursuit sits uneasily beside the other ways Rabo measures his artistic life. Circe Berman tells him that drawing and camouflage are the bedrock of his self-image: he has judged himself unsuccessful as a commercial artist, serious artist, husband, and father, and treats his great collection as an accident, yet continues to take pride in his ability to draw what his eye sees. Rabo accepts her account. The exchange does not settle whether drawing proves a deeper artistic identity; instead, it exposes the gap between a specific skill he can claim and the soul he has never been sure his paintings possess.

Art, Value, and the Self

The novel places this intimate aesthetic question against the public life of art as property. In its author’s note, the book disclaims the status of a responsible history of the Abstract Expressionist school and describes itself instead as a record of idiosyncratic responses. It also connects its subject to the enormous prices paid for works of art and to the distressing seriousness that concentrated wealth can impose on human playfulness. That framing complicates any effort to treat price, reputation, or historical importance as direct evidence of artistic soul.

Rabo says that his Abstract Expressionist paintings are about absolutely nothing but themselves. They belonged to him long before his marriage to Edith Taft, and their value, he says, was at least as great as the real estate, stocks, bonds, and share in the Cincinnati Bengals that she left him. His defense against being called a fortune-hunter makes ownership and monetary worth part of the argument, but it does not answer what the paintings communicate about their maker. The distinction between self-contained work and personal expression remains unresolved: a painting may refer to nothing outside itself and still, in Gregory’s account, embody its painter’s entire emotional spectrum.

The contrast becomes sharper when Circe, despite seeing respectable visitors from Switzerland and Japan treat some pictures almost as gods, rejects Rabo’s collection. She has witnessed him sell a Rothko from the wall to a man from the Getty Museum for $1.5 million, but she calls the work rubbish and urges him to get rid of the rest. Her reaction is not a neutral critical verdict; it sets worship and price against her conviction that the pictures are about nothing. The episode shows that the social life of a painting—its prestige, sale, and reception—can flourish without settling the question of what, if anything, it contains of a human self.

The instability of materials supplies a harsher counterpoint. In the early 1960s, an acrylic wall paint called Sateen Dura-Luxe wrecks Rabo’s paintings, although its advertisements had promised colors that would outlast the smile of the Mona Lisa. The promised permanence proves hollow: the Mona Lisa still smiles, while the paint has disappeared from the market, and Rabo calls the postwar world fubar with miracles. Whatever soul a painting may embody, it remains vulnerable to the stuff from which it is made. The failure of the material promise keeps artistic character distinct from mere durability.

The Unfinished Measure

Rabo imagines a test of his own artistic legacy: if every painting he had made were recovered and hung in a great domed rotunda so that their souls converged at one focal point, the women who had loved him—Marilee Kemp, Dorothy, and Edith—as well as Terry Kitchen, his best friend, would find no reason to think of him except randomly. Gregory, by contrast, would remain legible through his works. The thought experiment turns aesthetic criticism into a fear about remembrance: Rabo suspects that his paintings may fail to preserve any coherent trace of the person who made them.

Yet that imagined failure does not conclude the pursuit. In the studio, the fields of color are still beginnings; the teacher’s account leaves personality in the unresolved shortfall; and Rabo’s pride in drawing persists even as Circe challenges him to prove it. Soul remains neither a marketable property nor a settled technical achievement. It is the name Rabo gives to the human presence he wants his work to carry, while the novel keeps open the harder question of whether that presence is visible to anyone else.